


Xysiny w Yajnevth

by anthrop



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society, Blood, Body Modification, Dark Magic, Gen, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Lovecraftian Cults, Virgin Sacrifice
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-13
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 18:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/801585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/pseuds/anthrop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Humans and trolls cohabitate the same planet. Long ago there had been a war both long and devastating, and so it was decided--let dry land belong to the humans; leave the oceans to the trolls. Once every thirteen years a human child, marked from birth, is sacrificed to Gl'bgolyb in memory of this decision.</p><p>Rose Lalonde doesn't intend to go quietly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Waiting By The Vert Kirlian Sea

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be considerably longer (to include oodles of body horror, Gl'bgolyb herself, and Jade being as badass as always), but real life got nuts; you all know how that is.
> 
> Title of story comes from Aliceffekt's song of the same name, from the album [The Ehrivevnv Studies](http://aliceffekt.bandcamp.com/album/the-ehrivevnv-studies-reissue).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title of chapter comes from Aliceffekt's song of the same name, from the album [19th month, from Saharaphorest to Duomo](http://aliceffekt.bandcamp.com/album/19th-month-from-saharaphorest-to-duomo).

The ceremony will begin at dusk.

The sky is just beginning to purple in the east, the west still a blaze of oranges and blues melting through thin clouds. Evening shadows are driven away when they light the iron censers and thin black candles, set torch to fire pits dug in a horseshoe shape opposite The Gateway. The Gateway is nothing more than the little dock behind your house dressed up in arches of black and fuchsia wax cloth, complimented by long strings of curlicue green sigils burned and painted onto the wood. On the whole you consider it garish, oppressive, and embarrassingly teen Goth, but then again that is a description that also fits your life.

Garish, oppressive, and embarrassingly teen Goth--that is the sum of you.

You are certain the constant tremble of your limbs has nothing to do with nervousness and everything to do with how very cold you are. Today was your birthday, and while you would prefer to avoid the ceremony altogether (an impossible wish, and yet still you cross your fingers), the weather would have been infinitely nicer if your birthday happened to be in May rather than December. You hold the undesirable position of key player tonight, and thus you must wear the Garb of Hallowed Sacrifice. While it is heavy with elaborate stitching, it is still nothing more than a sort of _abaya_ of undyed cotton, hardly suitable protection against midwinter’s chill touch.

You lost all feeling in your naked hands and feet an hour ago at least, and you are half-afraid the chattering of your teeth will sever your tongue clean through, and then how will you say your last words? Words are important; they have always been important to you. Soon you will be all out and empty of them, and this thought makes a hard coil of terror settle in the pit of your stomach. Perhaps that is merely hunger, however. Ceremony requires you to fast for three days and nights, and you are dizzy and utterly sick of sucking on ice cubes.

There is time still before you must be at your station. You sit in one of the many black folding chairs set out in neat rows within the horseshoe. Emissaries, delegates, news crews, and even a few heads of state from many of Earth’s land dwelling countries are present. They have all left a wide berth between themselves and you. You are uncertain if this is customary, or if any of them are capable of feeling guilt for what they are forcing a young girl to do for the continued safety of humanity. Outwardly you return the same pointed disinterest. Inwardly you are screaming.

“Here.” Your mother appears, a cup of steaming black coffee in hand for you.

You blink at her. “I can’t.”

She waves your protest aside. The looseness of her joints suggests a higher level of inebriation than usual for her, but you can’t find fault with that today. “There’s no point this late in the game, Rosebud.”

She winks when she presses the mug into your unresponsive hands, which is how you know it’s been liberally dosed with hard liquor. Ah well, you’re too cold to argue. You drink and watch your breath steam in turns.

Finally the bells chime, and it is time to begin. You swallow down the last of your spiked coffee and stand. Your stride is wobbly thanks to your benumbed feet and the heady rush of caffeine and alcohol on an empty stomach, but you manage to reach your place before the Gateway without stumbling.

“I’m ready,” you say, and the first discordant note of the Valse of Convocation is struck. You smile with grim satisfaction at those in the gathered audience who cry out or make aborted attempts to cover their ears. This and many songs like it were your lullabies growing up. Let it be their turn for nightmares.

The first thirteen stanzas of the Valse finish. As the stanzas are repeated, high ranking cultists encircle you, their scarred and tattooed faces concealed by overlarge cowls. You are required to do nothing while they howl supplications to the rising moon and flay their arms bloody. You fold your hands together and take comfort in the two thin, hard ridges hidden in your skirt.  

The fourth and final set of thirteen stanzas finish. A high priest wearing hewn horns tangled with aquatic detritus--an altogether zigzagged and sill-looking headdress, but apparently of great importance--breaks the circle, lowers his red wet hands towards the frozen river, and begins to speak in the Ancient Tongue of the Dwellers in Dark Waters, imploring the Empress, the Secret Spawn of the Speaker, She of the Twisting Throne, The Horned Divinity, The Dream Witch, She Known By a Truly Absurd Number of Titles, to surface this night and take the Virgin Sacrifice to sate the terrible blood hunger of The White Devourer.

This, of course, takes a very long time. The Ancient Tongue is incapable of neither brevity nor sanity. You watch the priest and his blackly foaming mouth with the same idle interest one might regard a particularly busy snail, and find yourself bored.

Perhaps you doze off while he speaks. Suddenly--at least to you--the onlookers are gasping and recoiling in their seats, and there comes a thunderous cracking from beneath the ice. The agonized wails of the cultists reach a cacophonous peak, a peak that is answered by a shriek that is not audible so much as psychically whispered to you in your own internal voice. Weaker humans behind you clutch their skulls, blood spouting from their faces. You feel nothing more than the warning twinge of a headache, which is no surprise--you have prepared for this night all your life.

Like the skin of a rotted fruit, the ice at the edge of The Gateway splits open. Something whistles through the air too fast to see, and a scarce second later a golden trident, eight feet long and wickedly pronged at both ends, stabs deep into the frozen ground a bare yard from your toes. You do not flinch, but turn you gaze from its quivering points to the dark arm raised as if in challenge.

The Aylith has arrived.

You raise your empty hand. All falls silent. Overwrought priests and priestesses collapse to their knees, sweat and blood steaming off of them. It takes all of your willpower to walk when you are numb from the knees and elbows down, but you do not hesitate. Hesitation now is certain death, and death is something you'd like to put off for as long as possible.

Halfway to the edge of the Gateway, you stop, you wait.

A second fist punches through the thick ice as if it were a wet paper bag. Long claws latch onto frosted wood; this close, you can see there are too many joints to the fingers, and the webbing between them is the same shade of fuchsia as the decorations arching over you. Hands are followed by bright orange horns, curved and as long as your forearm, and then a head veiled by thick wet ropes of black hair. There is a muted flash of phosphorescent pink, and then the Aylith jumps out of the water as if on springs, landing in a crouch and a splash of icy water.

The Aylith is, surprisingly, much smaller than propaganda would have you believe. She is not twelve feet tall with horns to double her height and hair as wild and writhing as any horrorterror. When she stands, she is shorter--albeit noticeably more muscular--than you. Her snarl of chthonic hair only tickles the backs of her knees. She wears gauzy, layered skirts of pink and green; from the waist up she is naked. She is adorned instead with many bands of gold, much of it crusted over with pink gems and carved pieces of coral. You note that she has breasts but lacks nipples, and that her feet are uncannily human.

As you look her over she does the same to you, squinting against the firelight with bulbous pink and yellow eyes. When your eyes meet hers she bears a mouthful of needle teeth in a grin that could either be described as _pleased_ or _hungry_.

“Whale!” she says matter-of-factly with her hands on her hips. Her voice is loud, domineering, and thick with an accent that is strange but pleasant all the same. “Here I am and hear you are! You must be the Sacripike.”

“I am.” You are appalled. The Aylith uses  _fish puns_. You swallow down the hysterical laughter threatening to bubble out of you. “And you are the Empress of the Deep, come for my willing soul so that my people may live on the surface without fear of the Vast Glub another thirteen years.”

The Aylith laughs--no, that is the wrong word for it. She _giggles_. “Close! Her Imperiousness codn’t make it, so I volunteered to swim up to the surface in her place.”

Disquiet breaks out from the audience. You half turn at the sound of cautious footsteps behind you. The high priest has broken ritual; already the sigils are smoking, but he is granted one minute before the skin will be sloughed from his meat. “If you please,” he stammers, voice raw from screaming in a tongue not meant for human throats, “Only the Empress may take the Virgin Sacrifice for the ceremony to be complete.”

The Aylith--Empress she may not be, but you recognize the regal poise of her shoulders, the Pisces symbol carved into the fat fuchsia gem centered upon her brow--takes her time before even looking at the cringing priest. When she does, she purses her black lips and slaps the gills between her ribs with a distinctive _glub_. “You’re wrong,” she says. “There’s never been any specifincation that it has to be the Empress hershell, and anyway like I said she’s very busy so you will just have to glubbing make do with me!”

The priest, suitably abashed, retreats from The Gateway before his skin can blister too badly. 

She looks back to you, the feral shine of her long, thin teeth dims, becomes nearly friendly in the orange firelight. “So I think we shoal skip the all the fiddly bits and just get to the good part, don’t you agree?” She doesn’t give you time to answer, just rushes on with a lot of hand flapping for effect. “I never understood the glubbing point of all this cerefoamy and seariousness. You humans all act pike the world’ll come crashing around your gills if Gl’bgolyb isn’t worshrimped!”

Behind you, cameramen who had dared to step past the boundary between safe and potential head explosions keel over. Anger heats your blood and chills your voice. “You seem to forget that we _humans_ are particularly vulnerable to even the merest mention of the Carbuncle’s dread name. As history has shown, consequences arise when the ‘fiddly bits’ that keep my people alive are skimped.”

The Aylith has the decency to look halfway guilty. “She was only ever glubbing hello,” she says, the quietest she’s been yet. 

“I’m sure,” you reply dryly, fumbling your fingers into the twin pockets you had sewn into your _abaya_. “And the countries neighboring the Pacific Ocean have been the cost of Her wanton friendliness.”

The sound of your knitting needles sinking into the Aylith’s pink gills is something a little like the popping of a water balloon--a flat, hard splash. You’re numb to the elbows but you still feel the jar of impact. She stiffens under you, but rather than cry out with pain she actually has the gall to laugh. Gently-- _gently_ , and here you expected to be less your head if you failed to kill her on the first try--she pushes you off.

“Did you reely just try to bassassinate me?” With two little pops she removes your needles, bright with pink, and tosses them aside. “Sorry, but you’ll have to try betta than that to krill me!”

“I’ll be sure to be more merciless the next time," you say stupidly. 

“Good!” She giggles again, and then strides past you. Every cultist throws themselves to their faces, and many in the crowd flinch in their seats. The Aylith is breaking many unwritten rules. Then again this is her first night on the job, so perhaps she can be forgiven.

She picks up the nearest priestess off the frozen ground by the neck of her robes, lifting her to eye level. “Hello, can you understand me?” she asks. The priestess makes a gibbering noise that could be an affirmative or could be something about vanilla pudding. The Aylith doesn’t seem to mind either way. “Look, as Heiress Apparent I glub for the Seadwellers--we all deeply appreciate everyfin you humans do. The oceans have reely cleaned up and the coral reefs look krilliant again, reely they do! The Empress dolphinitely pikes the cerefoamies too, but if it’s alright I think I’m just going to take the Sacripike and go. Do anemone of you object to me doing that?”

No one knows how to answer her, so you steel your spine and walk to the inner edge of The Gateway--once crossed you cannot leave without being stricken blind, who even thought that was a good idea?--and clear your throat again. “If it isn’t too presumptuous, my Lady, I would suggest putting that woman down.”

She looks at you, bemusement arching her brows. “Why?”

“Well even if the rest of the cultists hadn't cut out their tongues, only the High Priest may speak to you directly.” You pause carefully. “Also you’re choking her.”

“Oh, whoops!” She sets the priestess down as if she’s afraid of breaking the poor woman (although considering the fabled strength of the Seadwellers that might be very possible). She looks at the High Priest with his stolen horns and ruined face, and you certainly feel no small personal pleasure as he quakes like a leaf in the wind.

“May we leave?” asks the Aylith.

“My-My Lady, there are _rules_ \--“

“Rules that were set by the Empress and the ancestors of your ancestors,” she interrupts, plucking her trident from the snow. “And they’ve never been glubbing necessary! Whether or knot the Sacripike is eaten is entirely up to Gl’bgolyb.” Ignoring the choir of moans, she looks out across the audience of presidents and kings and dictators, then over her knobby shoulder back at you. She winks.

The priest nods weakly. “Very well, My Lady. You may take the Virgin Sacripike--I mean Sacrifice--now.”

She’s grinning again when she makes a grab for you, but you stumble out of her reach. “Wait,” you stutter, your lips too cold for Ws, “I want to say goodbye to my mother. Please,” you add when she only stares.

Your mother doesn’t wait to see if the Aylith will allow it or not. She hops nimbly over the strewn bodies of prone cultists and gathers you into her arms with the fiercely constrictive hug that only a mother can ministrate. The heat of her is a shock that knocks the breath from you.

“Why did you try to kill her?” she whispers into your ear.

“I wanted to see if I could.”

Your mother’s laugh washes over you, wet and shaky with tears. “Oh my god, Rose,” she says. “Oh my god.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aylith is the name of a Great Old One introduced in the Call of Cthulhu roleplay game scenario “Twilight Memories.” Known also as The Widow in the Woods and The Many-Mother, she is described on Wikipedia as “a tall, shadowy humanoid figure with yellow glowing eyes and strange protrusions like the branches of dead trees.”
> 
> HIC’s title of The Dream Witch belongs to an Outer God called Yidhra, who “…has been on Earth since the first microorganisms appeared and is immortal. To survive in a changing environment, she gained the ability to take on the characteristics of any creature that she devoured.”


	2. Visiting God First Era (Gyroscope VI)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gl'bgolyb passes judgement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like I said before, I'm not done playing with this AU.
> 
> Chapter title comes from two of Aliceffekt's songs, off the album [How's Virgil Systems](http://aliceffekt.bandcamp.com/album/hows-virgil-systems).

You do not drown when the Aylith drags you under the ice. You do not drown when the water blackens and deepens, nor when freshwater becomes salt. You do not drown, you do not freeze. The water cannot even dampen your skin. The magic sung into the intricately coiled lace of your _abaya_ does not allow these things to happen. You must be deposited into the writhing white tentilla of Gl’bgolyb safely or not at all. You think of fruit flies and Venus fly traps, and your grip on the Aylith’s webbed hand tightens involuntarily.

“Rose.”

You blink at her through the oil slick rainbows sliding across your vision. “What?”

“That’s your name, isn’t it?”

“What do you care?” Your tone is distracted, clipped. This should worry you, but you are going to die anyway. What do you care if you offend the star spawn of an eldritch abomination?

She stops swimming as easily as you would stop walking. Her coils of black hair do not interfere with the neon fluff of gills that had sprouted from slits behind her facial fins the instant she was fully immersed. “I don’t know anyfin about you,” she says, and hastily adds, “I mean shore, Meenah told me what I should do on the surface and how the humans would probably react and that you would be the only gill in white and that you would have a mark to signify yourshell as the Sacripike --oh!”

You bob like a fishing lure beside her, ungainly, lungs full of stale air that pull you towards the surface. The Aylith floats beside you, perfectly still apart from the steady, unhurried flutter of pink at her neck and ribs. You fight the urge to petulantly fold your arms across your chest and frown instead. “So you neglected to confirm whether I am the true Sacrifice because you forgot to, rather than out of any sympathy towards me. Is that correct?”

It’s almost impressive, to see someone with so many needles in their mouth smile sheepishly. “You caught me,” she says, not sounding sorry in the least. “Would you show me your mark now?”

Curiously, the translucent skin keeping you dry and warm and uncrushed by the squeeze of the ocean resists itself. You try to touch your hand to your chest, but there is no friction; your fingers slide uselessly, sensing pressure but unable to feel fabric. There is no contact between yourself and yourself. You can nearly hear the soap bubble squeak. “What if I refused?”

She cocks her head with a little smile, as if you were a cat tangling itself in a skein of yarn. She finds it amusing that you would choke yourself in your antics. “Oh?”

You speak evenly, hoping that she cannot sense your racing heartbeat in the water. “What if I claimed to be a normal human? More importantly, what if I wasn’t lying?”

The Aylith purses her full lips in thought. “Whale if you _weren’t_ the Sacripike, I would krill you and feed your traitorous carcass to the sharks! And then, since sending a false Sacripike is a direct deviation from the laws set by the Empress and the first Landwalkers, my people would have no choice but to see it as a declaration of war!” She swims a neat circle around you, sleek and swift, utterly at home in open waters. “So I hope you haven’t lied to me, Rose. It would make things very bad for both our species!”

“What do I care? Liar or not, I still die.”

She looks at you then, not as an inferior species, but as if she’s noticed something worth pitying feels the fool for not having noticed sooner. “There are a lot of fins worse than death, you know.”

“If I had any choice at all, I’d take my chances.” You force your nails through the slippery spellskin protecting you from a crushing watery death, fumbling for the fashionable cluster of buttons at your neck. You undo six to expose the plum-colored birthmark spread just beneath your clavicle, the mark that cursed you from birth to die in the cavernous beak of Gl’bgolyb. There are as many symbols denoting potential sacrifices as there are glottal stops in the dead language of the Furthest Ring, but the placement is always the same.

The Aylith’s face is mere inches from your breast. Her teeth are bared eagerly, hungrily. Her eyes splash pink light across your naked skin. “The sun? There hasn’t been a Sacripike with the sun in a long time!”

You kick swiftly to put some distance between yourself and her, buttoning your neckline again. “Well,” you say, hating your breathlessness, the sour burst of adrenaline that makes your fingers shake. “Doesn’t that make me special?”

“It does though!” She grins and takes your hand. She cannot twine her fingers with yours due to the bright pink skin that stretches between her knuckles, despite her four-jointed digits. “Come on, Mom will dolphinitely want to meet you min-now!”

“Lucky me.”

She drags you down, down, down. Fuchsia bioluminescence swirls in slow, hypnotizing patterns across the Aylith’s skin, a guiding light pulling you towards the Lair of the Emissary. She is the only light this deep; nothing else dares live here. Gl’bgolyb is not called The White Devourer for nothing.

“There!” She points at something ahead. It takes you a moment longer to make out a white, serpentine shape--one of Gl’bgolyb’s outermost tentacles. The smallest suckers at its tip dwarf you completely as you pass them by, and the fear you had forgotten yawns again in the pit of your stomach.

Her hand cupping your cheek startles. “It’ll be okay, Rose. Mom looks a lot scarier than she reely is.”

“Considering she’ll be eating me as soon as we reach her beak, I think I’ll remain suitably frightened of her.”

“She might knot though.” The Aylith kicks her human feet a little faster, dragging you along. “She might decide you’re somefin speshell to kelp around.”

These puns are beginning to wear on you, but curiosity (and a rising need to find ways to ignore the white tentacles undulating on all sides) pushes you to ask, “Has that ever happened before?”

“Glub! I don’t know. I’m not very old yet; I still have a lot of songs left to learn.” She smiles, baring only most of her fangs. “Feferi.”

“What?”

“It’s my name! In case Mom doesn’t swallow you up in one gulp!”

The thought of a slow death in the belly of a horrorterror fills your throat with dread enough to strike you temporarily mute. The Aylith-- _Feferi_ \--lets you be.

Gl’bgolyb’s arms are innumerable, the scale of Her too huge for words (and you once took pride in your vocabulary, oh, aren’t you the fool?). The Emissary snacks on full-grown whales, feasts upon Her enemies unspeakable and drinks the light of galaxies. Trying to understand Her, Her thoughts and Her songs, is impossible. The reality of Her is simply too much for your tiny human brain to grasp. You are an insect crawling across Her vast white expanse. To her you are less than small--you are insignificant.

The visage of Gl’bgolyb is far worse than any holy text warned. You float before Her, your vision eaten up entirely by a terrible whiteness that cannot keep still. She is everything. She is the ender of all things. She is the death of the planet, dormant yet sullenly so. You are all that stands between Her and your species’ extinction.

It is very hard to breathe suddenly.

Feferi shoves you. “Go on, shelly!”

Shelly you may be, but your very soul quails when fifteen milk-white eyes focus on you. Your sense of scale was left behind on the surface; you cannot find the appropriate simile to describe the sheer size of even the smallest ocular staring down at you. Miles from one mouth and miles further from the other, yet you have never been so far from _safe_ in your life.

In the broodfester tongues of the Outer Ring, you greet Gl’bgolyb. It takes five minutes to say hello, but you don’t mind. Every second speaking is another second alive.

A tentilla, a mere forty yards long and lacking suckers, stretches outward from the millions of its brethren that make up Her shifting, flickering hide and curls loosely around you. You are surprised, not that She saw fit to take hold of Her virginal snack (and _oh_ , aren’t you weary of being reduced to the state of your hymen), but that She could do it so carefully. _Gently_. You did not expect an emissary to the Noble Circle to have the ability--let alone the inclination--to restrain Itself. What matter is the fragility of human bones to the eventual heat death of the universe?

The water shivers with Her whispers.

**seer**

**we have waited long for your arrival**

English? How unexpected.

You bow your head demurely. “I apologize for not arriving sooner, but there was little to be done to urge the onset of puberty along any faster, O She of the Labyrinthine Deeps.”

**you are intended as sacrifice**

Words gather thickly at the base of your tongue. You swallow most of them down. “I am.”

**you have been deemed ill-suited for consumption**

The words you have always wished to hear.

The words you have always dreaded to hear.

You remember reading about the sundering of the Ring of Fire, of human and troll deaths untold. The birthmark on your chest feels hot and you can’t be sure if you’re imagining that or not. “She Whose Name May Not Be Spoken Aloud Without Pain, I don’t understand. Have I not done everything required of me? How am I not acceptable?”

**you misunderstand**

**rejoice seer**

**you are to be accepted into the tangle**

Behind you, Feferi makes a delighted squeal. Her too-long fingers grip you tightly by the shoulders and she spins you to face her wide, wide mouth. You half-expect her to tear your throat out. You are not prepared at all when she kisses you, right on the mouth and everything. Her teeth are exactly as sharp as they look, and they tear through the spellskin keeping you safe as if it were made of tissue paper.

Water fills your mouth, your throat, your lungs. It is altogether a very poor first kiss, as these things are rated. Zero out of ten, would not recommend Feferi Peixes to use tongue like that ever again.

You drown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> She of the Labyrinthine Deeps is a reference to Eihort, God of the Labyrinth, who “appears as a huge, pallid, gelatinous oval with myriad legs and multiple eyes.”


End file.
